New Guide Shows Hostel Trend Well Established in Australia & the South Pacific

[Earl Hardie Karges]

 Hostels Are the ‘New Normal’ Down Under

Los Angeles, CA, August 23, 2013—“500 Hostels in Australia, New Zealand, & Pacific Islands: Backpackers and Flashpackers,” (ISBN 978-0988490574, Hypertravel Books) by Hardie Karges, is available now at www.amazon.com and elsewhere online in both paperback and Kindle e-book format.  The most comprehensive book yet to document and catalog hostels in Oceania, “500 Hostels” is more than just a guide to hostels for backpackers.   For one thing, it’s aimed at any and all independent travelers, not just backpackers, since many backpackers have now upgraded to “flashpackers,” a more modern and tech-savvy version of the original concept.  For another, it also combines a directory with “how-to” information, historical, background, and personal vignettes of all the places where hostels are found.  And this is just the beginning.  Now ubiquitous on the populous East coast, hostels are making rapid gains on the country’s West coast and interior.

 

“If you like hostels, then you’re going to love Australia and New Zealand,” Karges says, “for here is the greatest concentration of backpackers’ hostels in the world, on both coasts and everywhere in between.  These are some of the nicest people and the nicest landscapes in the world, too, something of a cross between America and Europe,” he continues.  The Pacific Islands are something else entirely, of course, with a diversity that runs the gamut from the modern mega-cities of Jakarta and Manila to the remote outback tribalism of Borneo and Papua New Guinea.  But there are hostels in all of them.  Fiji has a beach hostel scene to rival Greece, and even the remote archipelagos of Tonga and Samoa, Vanuatu and Timor are represented, also.  “They’re good ones, too,” Karges adds, “not just cheap backpacker digs.”

 

Author Karges has traveled to approximately one hundred fifty countries over the course of forty years, much of it described in intimate detail and vivid prose in his narrative travel book, “Hypertravel: 100 Countries in 2 Years.” This is the fourth book of the ‘Backpackers and Flashpackers’ series, after previous versions for Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and North America.   “A happy accident of these books is that it suggests a new paradigm for travel guides, one that I would use—just the facts, and just the best places,” says Karges.  After all, these books are at their best when used in advance, to facilitate a hostel-based trip.  If there aren’t any hostels there, then a place just may not be worth visiting. 

Hypertravel Books is a newly formed imprint in Los   Angeles, CA, with the mission to promote smart travel.  Advise if you would like to see a PDF or paperback copy of the book for review purposes.  Advance copies of the manuscript for the next edition—“1000 Hostels in North Europe”—are also available.

 

Karges can be contacted at [e-mail].

 

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